Nokia N97 – Nokia's mystery Smartphone or Social Networking Mobile [Gadget Review]

Design

• TheN97 is a typical QWERTY-equipped side-slider at 117.2×55.3×15.9 mm Due to its increased length, the N97 doesn’t feel all that chubby and if u compare it with 5800 it is much more well proportioned.
• At 150 grams the N97 is a pretty large smartphone .
• Well you have 2 colour choices in the phone , white , which would be a great choice for women and Dark brown , which has an executive look .Both colours look great though.

• The metallic strip Running along the N97’s front fascia isn’t as tall as that found on the Nokia 5800, so its display isn’t sunk so far into the casing, plus the physical size of the N97’s screen allows for more comfortable operation.
• Sitting above the display are the forward-facing video camera and ambient light sensor.
• One side effect of the stable and sturdy hinge is that the space available for the qwerty keyboard is rather restricted, in terms of rows of keys.
• Another design element which would have been trivial to fix is that the current key legends are comparatively small. They look clear enough in the photos, but use the N97 in real life in average light and your eyes have to be pretty good to always see which key you’re about to hit.
• 

Features

• On the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, you won’t get much of the swiping and flicking finger action but they’ve refined it so that you can get that much out of the Nokia N97. Also, compared with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic demo version, the Nokia N97 interface is quite fast and responsive.
• The Nokia N97 also supports TV Out, WiFi, class 32GPRS, class 32 EDGE, Bluetooth, GPS, FM radio, and a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics.

• The cameras in Nokia’s Nseries smartphones haven’t really improved much since the classic N95 – the specification has remained identical, while we’ve seen minor variations in colour handling and video focus. We now have dual LED flash, which is obviously better then single LED, but light years short of the Xenon flash on the N82 and 6220.In use, stills results are excellent and even better than those from the N95, with slightly better colour accuracy.

• the phone has upto 32GB shared memory and also supports Micro SD cards.
• The screen has an accelerometer sensor for auto-rotating the display
• Supports handwriting recognition
• Stereo FM radio with RDS, Visual Radio and an FM along with 3.5mm earphone socket that doubles up for a TV out for audio and video.

• This is the second Nokia handset with tri-band HSDPA and it’s awesome they’ve finally come around. In addition to the UMTS sex appeal, you’ve also got a quad-band EDGE radio, Bluetooth 2.0, and Wi-Fi all built in. Very, very cool.

Pros and Cons

PROS

• Good third party application bundle
• Fiddly, non-standard qwerty button keyboard
• Kinetic scrolling in Web, Ovi Store and other Webkit-based apps
• Video camera focussed on infinity rather than on people
• Great build quality
• 32GB of flash memory
• Good external buttons and d-pad
• Terrific homescreen ‘live’ widgets
• Widgets include key social networking destinations like Facebook and Hi5 through which we can keep in touch with our network “Anywhere/Everywhere”
• Powerful battery

CONS

• Relatively low RAM
• Mature camera system
• Cam-based hinge with ribbon cable – however strong, there’s the possibility of breakage, failure and dirt/dust ingress – better treat the N97 nicely, everybody!
• No TV out cable supplied in the box
• Immature firmware (typically true of any phone at first, of course)

A final word

Having said all that, the Nokia N97 is a wonderful phone. Looks cool, very customizable (it also comes with a lot of re-learning on how to use a Nokia phone). A 5 mega pixel camera with a lens protector, 32MB memory, slide out keyboard, lots of pre-installed applications including Facebook and Straits Times. Well, if you want technical review, there are hundreds of reviews already online.

The biggest plus for me is that the phone “Comes with Music”. Millions of songs waiting to be (legally) downloaded – that itself is worth the price of the new phone! I have already downloaded hundreds of songs. The collection is amazing – equally amazing is the fact that all the songs downloaded, can be kept even after the free subscription (for one year) is over. I just can’t believe it. And yes, the music plays in one PC also.

And of course the new phone comes with a new power connector tip, ensuring that all the old Nokia power cables are all obsolete! When is this going to end?

In summary – a wonderful phone with a lousy PC/internet integration…

Cheers!!!

~ⓅⓎⓇⓄⓉⒺⒸⒽⓃⒾⒸⓅⒾⓍⒾⒺ~